advantage; and in the last
place, they oppress the merchant, who is often obliged to pay them
himself without any retribution from the consumer. When the demand is
equal to the quantity of goods at market, the consumer generally
pays the duty; but when the markets happen to be overstocked, a great
proportion falls upon the merchant, and sometimes not only exhausts
his profits, but breaks in upon his capital. I am apt to think that
a division of the duty, between the seller and the buyer, more often
happens than is commonly imagined. It is not always possible to raise
the price of a commodity in exact proportion to every additional
imposition laid upon it. The merchant, especially in a country of small
commercial capital, is often under a necessity of keeping prices down in
order to a more expeditious sale.

The maxim that the consumer is the payer, is so much oftener true than
the reverse of the proposition, that it is far more equitable that the
duties on imports should go into a common stock, than that they should
redound to the exclusive benefit of the importing States. But it is not
so generally true as to render it equitable, that those duties should
form the only national fund. When they are paid by the merchant they
operate as an additional tax upon the importing State, whose citizens
pay their proportion of them in the character of consumers. In this view
they are productive of inequality among the States; which inequality
would be increased with the increased extent of the duties. The
confinement of the national revenues to this species of imposts would
be attended with inequality, from a different cause, between the
manufacturing and the non-manufacturing States. The States which can
go farthest towards the supply of their own wants, by their own
manufactures, will not, according to their numbers or wealth, consume so
great a proportion of imported articles as those States which are not
in the same favorable situation. They would not, therefore, in this mode
alone contribute to the public treasury in a ratio to their abilities.
To make them do this it is necessary that recourse be had to excises,
the proper objects of which are particular kinds of manufactures. New
York is more deeply interested in these considerations than such of
her citizens as contend for limiting the power of the Union to external
taxation may be aware of. New York is an importing State, and is not
likely speedily to be, to any great ext